Carnifex

11/3/467 AC, Nicobar Straits

A thick haze floated over the water, reducing visibility to no more than two hundred meters in the daytime. At night, a sailor could, sometimes, see the end of his nose. The haze was not from the weather. Rather, it was mostly smoke from grass and brush fires that raged uncontrolled upwind of the Straits.

On any given clear day the Straits would have a steady hum as more than one hundred and fifty ships made passage through it. When the haze closed down like this, though, all the ships stopped engines and dropped anchors. Even the risk of pirate attack was better than risking a wreck.

Parameswara, chieftain of his own band of pirates smiled in the silence. Tonight was not a night for piracy. The ships were safe for the nonce from him and his men.

I have a better fish to catch tonight, he thought

* * *

One remarkable feature of Nicobar piracy was not that it was entirely Islamic, but that it was not entirely Islamic. Indeed, there were Hindu pirates, Sikh pirates, animist pirates, Buddhist pirates . . . even "Christian" pirates. There were Chinese pirates and Tamil pirates. There were white, black, brown, and yellow pirates. In all, there were—and not counting mere part timers—some thirty-three large bands of pirates, plus substantial numbers of small time freelancers, not more than half of either Moslem.

They all hated each other; that was key.

It had taken some time, and considerable intelligence support from Robinson, before Mustafa had determined the solution to his problem. It was really elegant in its conceptual simplicity. Mustafa would help and direct one not terribly large or powerful Moslem group, under the leadership of a fat, middle-aged Malay cutthroat named Parameswara, to take over, one by one, all the non-Moslem pirates. That band would then be large to take on the largest of the Moslem bands. That united band would then be large enough to have little difficulty taking over the rest of the Moslem bands. At that point, there would be enough Moslems under cohesive leadership to exterminate the previously allied non-Moslem pirates.

That was one elegant concept. More elegant still, so much so that Mustafa nearly shivered when he thought upon it, was that the ultimate targets of the pirates, his ultimate target, the shippers of the industrialized world, would pay to have Parameswara do this.

In the short term, the Malay would do precisely as he said, suppress piracy. The shippers, like all their ilk, rarely thought in the long term. Short-term returns were what kept them in their cushy jobs. Short-term returns were what got them golden parachute packages. Indeed, that much at least Terra Nova's capitalists shared with its progressives. There was little practical difference between a progressive, or an outright socialist, promising to rape an economy for short-term gain to buy votes from the masses and a capitalist raping a company for short-term gains to buy votes from the stockholders.

So, at least, Mustafa thought of it. And, in principle, giving money to Parameswara to protect their ships from pirates was not substantially different than paying it to Abdulahi, as an increasing number of shippers were, to keep his merry boys from seizing their ships.

The part Mustafa had the greatest difficulty in understanding was the failure of the shippers to arrange for their own ships' protection. Is it that we are charging one drachma less than it would cost the shippers to hire mercenaries for protection? Are they really that short-sighted? They must be.

One form of aid Mustafa had given Parameswara was a company of his own mujahadin. That company had also brought with it modern weapons ranging from rifles to heavy machine guns and rocket grenade launchers, or RGLs, sufficient to arm ten times Parameswara's band. In addition, they had brought money, a doctor, night vision equipment and radios.

Mostly, they brought expertise. The war to gain control of the pirate factions of the Nicobar Straits would be fought mostly on land.

* * *

The engine was killed even as the boat's pilot turned the wheel hard a port, toward the coast. Landfall was a subdued scraping of muck along the lead vessel's bottom, followed by a shuddering stop. There was no sound except the lapping of small waves on the hull of the boat, the sound of feet scraping along a dirty wooden deck and the quiet splashing of men easing themselves over the side to the waist-deep, murky and polluted water.

Mustafa's man—called, simply, al Naquib—sniffed at the unpleasant smell composed of mixed smoke, salt sea, rotting jungle vegetation, and pollution. It was so unlike his native desert that inside he cringed.

Still, the mission was important and if al Naquib had to put up with a few esoteric smells to complete it, then so be it. He, too, eased himself over the side and into the foul water. Parameswara followed.

"Place not far," the Malay bandit advised. He spoke a sort of pidgin Arabic that served as a lingua franca along the Straits.

"I hope not," al Naquib answered. "My men are not used to the jungle. I am not used to it either."

"'Not far,'" the Malay repeated, then left to take the lead to guide the mujahadin toward their target.

* * *

The village sat on a low promontory above a slow flowing, greenish river. Culturally and ethnically the place was Chinese, part of the diaspora on Old Earth that had been replicated by forcible immigration to the New. The ethnicity could be seen in the architecture, smelled in the aroma of cooking, and heard in the sing-song speech of early-rising women. Boats were tied up to the riverbank, below the village. Most were unpowered. One, however, sitting low and lean and rakish, had a powerful outboard mounted to the stern. This was the boat the men of the village used for their piratical forays.

Parameswara eyed the boat hungrily. It would make a fine addition to his small fleet. Only let the Yithrabi, Al Naquib, do his job as Mustafa promised me he would.

In the dank, green jungle surrounding the village, al Naquib was doing just that, positioning the men of his company by squads. The early morning calls of birds covered the sound of his movements, and it did those of his men and Parameswara's, and the few words he spoke. Even without the birds, it is doubtful they would have been heard over the chatter of the village's women.

* * *

Yuan Lin was the village chief's senior wife. This didn't protect her from having to rise early, just like any of the other women, to clean and to cook. At most, her position allowed her to drop some of the more onerous duties on the younger women.

She was doing just that, slapping into submission the chief's newest concubine, a fifteen-year-old Cochinese girl seized from a refugee barge, when armed men began emerging from the steamy jungle surrounding the village. Lin opened her mouth to call out a warning. She stopped and closed it again when she saw just how many fighters were swarming the place and how quickly they were doing it.

Wide-eyed, Lin stood with a basket of laundry on one hip, her free hand still raised to strike the Cochinese, when a man materialized in front of her and made pushing motions with the rifle held crossways in front of him. She used her free hand to grab the Cochinese by the ear and pulled her in the direction—the center of the village—where the armed man had indicated he wanted them to go.

The thing that was surprising, perhaps, was that Lin was neither terribly upset nor terribly afraid. She had herself been seized in a raid when she was even younger than the Cochinese. As she'd discovered then, she was a woman, she was not a threat or competitor, and she had value. She might be raped but she'd been through all that before and survived well enough. Nothing worse was likely to happen to her now. As a matter of fact, Lin didn't even necessarily object to being raped as long as she wasn't going to be permanently damaged by the experience.

* * *

Al Naquib and Parameswara stood in the village center, watching as the people—men and boys, women and girls—were herded, cattle-like, inward.

"Fine," al Naquib said, "you have control of the village. Who do you want killed?"

"Maybe . . . nobody," Parameswara answered. "Dead, they no use . . . me . . . anybody. I see how it fall out."

Mustafa's man merely shrugged, Up to you.

Parameswara nodded and walked out into the center of the square.

"I'm glad you were all so eager to talk to me," he began with a smile, eliciting a nervous chuckle from the villagers. "And I hope you don't mind that I invited a few close friends along." Parameswara's hand swept around, taking in the more than two hundred that accompanied him.

That earned another mass chuckle, a bit more sincere than the first. After all, why not? He hadn't killed anyone yet and it never hurt to laugh at someone else's jokes. Even Chang Tsai, the chief of the village, joined in the laugh. He, most especially, feared being dead soon. What better reason to try to ingratiate himself with Parameswara?

The Malay chief had a gift for oratory. He spoke of the rising sun and the setting sun. He talked of the low tide always returning as a new high. He talked of the Prophet and he spoke of the Buddha. He waxed eloquent over the future and the past.

What he means is, we join him or he kills every man, woman and child in the village, thought Chang Tsai. It would be better to join.